As a strong advocate of localism and regional decision making, I was delighted to hear Caroline Spelman’s party conference speech in which she made a firm pledge to restore power to local communities up and down the land. Since being elected as a local Councillor in 2008, I have been staggered by the degree to which the bureaucratic arm of central government has acted to frustrate and stagnate progress on local issues. Labour’s obsession with top-down control and target driven results has been at the expense of the wishes of local people. The rise of non-elected quangos has further diluted the power of elected representatives and therefore the people they represent.
That is why the Conservative Party has pledged to break the stifling grip of central government and in its place allow local communities to flourish. Under the plans ward councilors like me will have greater control over the setting of the council’s budget and more power to see that the manifesto pledges we have campaigned on can be implemented. We will be able to respond to the concerns of residents without having to cut through red tape and jump through the hoops set down by a multitude of government directives. By cutting through the bureaucracy imposed by central government we can breath new life into local government, making it more accessible and accountable to local people and not Labour politicians in Whitehall.
I am confident that the proposals laid out by the Conservative Party for improving local government are going to make a dramatic difference to the way in which I can help local people in my ward. It is for this reason that I hope that next year the years of Labour mismanagement and incompetency will be swept away by a newly elected Conservative government; a government that will place people first.
Full details of Caroline’s speech can be found here.
